by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

As I was growing up, my whole wide world was Jewish: Jewish camp, Jewish synagogue, Jewish youth group, Jewish neighborhood. From nursery all the way up to the end of twelfth grade, I attended Jewish day school. I lived, ate, and breathed Jewdom, and inevitably all of my friends were Jewwy Jews, just like me. I didn’t choose that life, mind you, it was chosen for me by my parents, and once I graduated high school, my universe expanded to include the ethnocultural communities that had always existed only a bus ride away, just beyond the pale of the Jewish settlement pattern. Now, looking back upon that era, when there were never fewer than three or four David’s in a room at any one time, I can reflect upon the various advantages and disadvantages of living in a sheltered shtetl, the equivalent of a tiny little village nestled inside of a multicultural metropolis.

I don’t have any regrets about the way that I was brought up. As immigrants and ethnic minorities, my parents did the best that they could under the circumstances. I sure learned a lot about Biblical and Rabbinic scripture, Jewish history, and how to speak Hebrew. But I’m a naturally curious person, and if I wouldn’t have picked that up in high school, I would have learned it auto-didactically afterwards. At that time, my understanding of other people’s herstories was regrettably minimal; but in the years that would follow, I availed myself of many other opportunities to become intimately acquainted with the narratives of other nations. I could not possibly have learned everything that I need to know in the world in only four years, or even in fourteen. Thankfully, I was born at the right time in the right place on the right side of the border, with the right amount of money, so I continue to have access to all kinds of information.

But I do feel that Diasporic Jewish education is delinquent in at least one way: in its inordinate focus on law and accounting, to the detriment of the arts. In the big city that I grew up in, the local Hebrew high school didn’t have any arts program to speak of. I realize that because almost all Jewish schools are privately-funded, the cost of tuition is prohibitively high for many families, and so in order to remain economically competitive, something’s got to give, and it sure isn’t going to be reading, writing, or arithmetic. So we can’t judge Jewish schools by same standards as federally-funded public schools, in terms of resources devoted to creative arts and media literacy. But the overwhelming emphasis that is put on the most economically lucrative professions means that Jewish generations Y & Z are not picking up enough of the artistic tools that they will need to reinterpret and reinvent the world around them. Instead of getting an education in the Classics, too many Jewish students are getting an education in classism.

If you’ve ever been to Israel, one of the first things you will notice is that almost all of the security guards here are Jewish. So are almost all of the waiters, as are a majority of the street sweepers. In Israel, Jews have cornered the market on carpentry, and the city streets are crawling with circumcised bike couriers. There are obvious exceptions to this general rule; in the last twenty years, Israeli big business drove down real wages for working-class Jews, so the government imported a third-world work force that is willing to labour for less than minimum wage. But for the most part, there is much less social stigma attached to doing manual labour, working in the service trades, and in general, earning modest wages for honest work. Here, cab drivers aren’t considered to be stupid; they are the average man’s go-to guys when you need some amateur psychological advice.

Back to the other side of the pond. Let me turn the tables and play devil’s advocate for a minute. Wouldn’t you say that there are probably enough lawyers in the world already? I mean, ideally, shouldn’t the law of the land should be basic enough for just about anybody to be able to easily comprehend? Doesn’t true democracy dictate that we should never require intermediaries or paid professionals just to negotiate simple justice? And I think accountants fall into this category as well — the category of propping up an overly-complicated and often-corrupt system of centralization of power. Because if it’s so complicated to calculate the amount of money that I need to contribute to the collective, then perhaps it shouldn’t be leaving the community in the first place? Maybe more of the surplus that we produce should remain in our neighborhoods, so that we can see the good that it does in measurable amounts. Better that we have resilient local economies that bloated bureaucracies and impoverished peripheries, right?

I realize that some of the people reading this article may be lawyers and accountants themselves! Try not to take this as a personal attack, it’s not about you, it’s about the system. Ultimately, it’s not about exchanging court cases and calculators for paintbrushes and poetry notebooks; it’s about rounding out the Jewish school regimen with a curriculum that encourages creativity. You may point out that we are dependent upon the rich and powerful professionals who can afford to donate large sums of money to worthy community causes. Up until now, that may very well have been the case. But this is one of the very reasons that JGooders even exists: to make microphilanthropy a viable strategy, so that everyday people earning average incomes can financially contribute to the community. Together, we can all take care of the segments of our society that are still struggling.

Ultimately, it would be amazing if every single student grew up to become exactly what he or she wanted to. I hope that gets to happen as often as possible. But our children’s choices do not exist in a vacuum; they are informed by the priorities that we establish for them, and more specifically, what we fund with our donation dollars. Parents and principals are setting benchmarks for the next generation of Jews, and so should the people. If your Jewish experience is informed by Jewish art and architecture, Jewish painting and poetry, Jewish music and theatre — and when you think about it, whose Jewish experience isn’t? — then it is incumbent upon you to actively support a flourishing Jewish art scene. Because not every Jewish student wants to get their MBA, and thankfully not all of them need to. For every kid that really wants to go into business or banking, there are a hundred helping hands. And for the rest of us artsy-fartsy types, there is the Paideia Project and the Jewish Salons.

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

The hour-and-a-half-long documentary Earthlings starts off with a statement of fact that will resonate with anyone who has ever taken an active role in a social justice movement. There are three stages in the response to Truth: At first, Ridicule. Then, Violent Opposition. And finally, Acceptance. That’s the way it always is with the fight for civil liberties, and that’s the way it was exactly fifty years ago when four Black students sat down at a cafeteria in North Carolina and ordered food, expecting to be served just like anybody else. Racism isn’t over, not in the United States, and not anywhere else in the world, not by a long shot. But at least the most obvious and obscene manifestations of it, the Jim Crow laws, have been obliterated for good.

The struggle for legal equality and human dignity would take four more years until the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. But only a month and a half after the original 1960 sit-in, President Eisenhower voiced his support for the Greensboro Four, publicly announcing that he was “deeply sympathetic with efforts of any group to enjoy the rights of equality”. Take careful note of the course of events: a group of people openly act in contravention to the law of the land — in a non-violent manner — because they believe that the law itself is unjust; and the Chief Executive Officer commissioned to uphold and enforce those laws lends ideological support to said lawbreakers. This is why a national holiday was established to honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: to honor the all-American acts of civil disobedience in the face of injustice.

As time passes, we continue to realize the existence of other oppressions that we are partially responsible for, and one by one, the most altruistic among us fight alongside the oppressed class to secure their welfare and equal rights. In time-honored tradition, social conservatives resist the demands for full equality, and social progressives advocate for it. Eventually, there is a critical mass of social liberals in the middle that are converted to the cause, and the tide turns. But ever since 9/11, the status quo has started to pole-shift in the opposite direction. Dr. King’s legacy has been appropriated and whitewashed; nowadays, nobody remembers his support for labor struggles and his public opposition to the war in Vietnam. Francis Fukuyama would have us believe that we have reached the end of history: America is perfect, and there are no more inequalities to uncover, no more injustices to rail against.

This is why animal-rights activists are now being criminalized by the corporations with the help of the politicians that are in their pockets. In March of 2009, Will Potter of GreenIsTheNewRed.com wrote: “With just six members of Congress in the room, just hours after lawmakers and celebrities were on hand to break ground for the new memorial honoring… Martin Luther King Jr., the House of Representatives passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law so vague and broad that the non-violent tactics of MLK and Gandhi are now ‘terrorism’.” Free speech in defense of non-human animals — the kind that was previously protected under the First Amendment – was made illegal with the stroke of a pen. Animal-rights activists that have never physically harmed another human are being legally labeled full-on terrorists by the federal government.

Why is this happening? Because we’re winning. High-tech spy cameras now allow investigative journalists to infiltrate the factories where the worst abuses are perpetrated and shine a light on the atrocities. When ethical individuals learn of the crimes that are committed in their names behind closed doors, they become morally outraged and demand an end to the inhumanity. But treating animals as anything other than non-sentient raw materials for the money machine would cut into the industry’s annual profit margins. So to stem the spread of anti-meat sentiment, the corporations of carnage ridiculously rebrand the Humane Society as the new Al-Qaida (link potentially NSFW). But there are two sides to this propaganda battle. As Jewish Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevitz Singer said on more than one occasion, “In relation to animals, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka”.

This issue isn’t about humans eating animals for sustenance. Jewish people bury their dead in simple caskets that can be bored through in no time. In Israel, Jews are laid to rest under the ground with nothing but a simple shroud. Within weeks, the worms start to eat away at our flesh, and birds eventually eat those worms. It would be inconsistent to proclaim that all animal meat is off-limits to humans, when our own molecules are funneled right back into the food chain. We can commend people who choose not to eat any animal products altogether, but not every animal-rights activist is a seventh-level vegan; it is possible to eat animal meat, and still do so respectfully. But conventional animal farms and industrial abattoirs treat living beings, our animal brothers and sisters, like inanimate objects with no holy soul. Cosmetic laboratories and fur farms occupy an even lower rung on the ladder of human cruelty.

It is quite likely that in another fifty years time — if our civilization is still standing! — we will have added speciesism (discrimination against other species) to sexism, racism, and the rest of the long list of isms that we righteously vilify. If that day comes, we will look back upon this battle as just one more stepping stone towards the liberation of all living beings, the fullest realization of the phrase Tikkun Olam. But in this day and age, it has become risky business to make a public appeal to support the actions of animal-rights activists. So I will simply direct your attention to an organization whose activities are still considered to be completely legal, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. If you care for the animal kingdom, and if you believe that one measure of our own divinity is the way in which we treat other species, then please do what you can to support their struggle.

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Half a lifetime ago, when I started out at university, my major was economics, of all things. At the end of my first year of undergrad, I finished at the top of the entire freshman class. But I wasn’t satisfied by my studies, I didn’t enjoy what I was learning, I couldn’t figure out how to apply cold calculus to improve the human condition. So I switched my major to psychology, so I could try to understand the human mind. I’m very glad that I did, and to this day I enjoy learning new scientific facts about the way that we think and feel, and the way that we act on our thoughts and feelings. But ever since, economics has been in my blind spot; it’s my Achilles heel, and I can’t seem to find any shoe that will fit on it.

A few years ago, an independently-made documentary movie grabbed my attention when it became the most downloaded film of all time in 2007. It also screened at the prestigious Artivist Film Festival in Hollywood, California, where film industry activists gave it institutional support. That film deals with a wide range of topics, including the history of Chrisitianity and the World Trade Center attacks. In the wake of its incredible underground success, the team behind Zeitgeist put out a sequel called Addendum that deals mainly with money matters: the history of modern banking and international finance. Addendum’s thorough economic analysis stunned and scared me; I now know a lot more about money, but I’m still not sure what to do about it.

I invite you to watch the film online and let me know what you think of it. Most of the time, I focus on specific issues and organizations that demand our attention, as a caring and compassionate community. But since this blog is all about philanthropy, the redistribution of large sums of money, I think it’s important that on occasion, we zoom out from the micro to the macro, and ask ourselves if the overall banking system that is the infrastructure for all of our economic activities is what we want it to be. With the entire country of Greece in receivership and several other European countries teetering on the brink of economic collapse, I’d say it’s high time we had a conversation about managing money on a national level!

Now since I know that you’ve got plenty of other important things to do, and you probably can’t be bothered to listened to somebody blab on and on about banking for over two hours, I’m going to put together a little listener’s guide for you. First off, skip the first five minutes of the film, unless you’re in the mood for a philosophic introduction. Watch it from the 5-minute mark until 25 minutes into the film. At that point, they start discussing the effects of economics on foreign policy, with commentary by John Perkins, author of New York Times best-seller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. After half an hour of geopolitical analysis, futurist Jacque Fresco presents his innovative architectural designs, and proclaims that these are the solutions to all that ails our society.

The Addendum film has become so popular that it has spawned a network of interest groups across North America and beyond. There’s even a Zeitgeist group here in Israel that promotes these ideas. I’m not going to use this space to analyze Fresco’s architectural ideas — personally, I believe that his models do not take into account the amount of fossil fuel energy that we can realistically expect to have at our disposal, to build a better industrial infrastructure. But regardless of which solution will save us — it would seem that the Zeitgeist analysis of American banking is infallible. Watch at least the first 25 minutes, and then let’s have a conversation about what we need to do about it.

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Now that all of the airlines have changed their rules and have started charging passengers an arm and a leg for every pound of luggage over the legal limit, you really have to weigh every item that you consider bringing to Israel, both literally and figuratively. But just as travel regulations have changed over the years, so has the Israeli consumer goods market; there’s no more need to smuggle several pairs of Levi’s jeans in your trunk, all of the big-name brands have set up shop here, and are only too eager to take your hard-earned shekels in exchange for overpriced merchandise. Nowadays, the only items that still aren’t available in Israel don’t show up on the retail shelves due to cultural differences. And chief among them are the thick mitts made out of cow, with webbing between the thumb and index finger — the consumer product commonly called baseball gloves.

For some reason, basketball and soccer (European football) have a near-monopoly on the hearts and minds of young Israelis. Maybe it’s because those are the sports that require the least amount of expensive equipment to play the game. For basketball, all that is required is a paved surface, two poles and a couple of buckets. For soccer, the requirements are even fewer; basically, all you need is a leather ball. Nowadays, you can probably buy a five-pack of soccer balls from China for the price of a felafel. Back way back when the Zionist pioneers were sketching out the first settlements in Mandatory Palestine, times were hard and disposable income almost didn’t exist. So soccer and basketball became firmly entrenched in the Israeli psyche as national pastimes. American football and Australian rules rugby are ironically a little bit too violent for the Middle Eastern mentality. And in a country that almost never sees snow, hockey is not even an option. But what about baseball?

Baseball is slow: in between pitches and plays, you could fall asleep at the wheel and swerve off into the dugout. Baseball isn’t for jocks, it’s for math nerds: just to keep up with the scoreboard, you’re got to have a photographic memory and a graphing calculator on hand. But there’s something romantic about baseball that all the strikes and scandals, all the drugs and lockouts can’t erase. No one pines away for an old grassy tennis court, but lots people took home small pieces of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Chicago’s Comiskey Park, and Detroit’s Tigers Stadium. I think that the Billy Crystal film City Slickers summed in up best. In the film, three friends cross the country (with a herd of cattle!) and open up to each other about the moments that mean the most. Actor Daniel Stern recalls almost never getting along with his own father, having almost nothing in common with him — except for baseball. Usually at each other’s throats, they could pass the time together in perfect peace watching a Saturday afternoon ball game, because it was the great equalizer, the common denominator. It was the Sulha that soothed over differences, like a slice of mom’s apple pie.

I guess that that’s the thinking behind Bringing Baseball to Communities of Need, a charitable organization in Israel that wants to introduce baseball to a new generation of non-Anglophone Israelis, Jews and Arabs, Russians and Ethiopians. The project’s proponents believe that baseball builds individual character and teaches teamwork and tolerance. What’s certain is that unless we buy them the bases, the bats, the hats and the mitts, lower-income kids will never know the difference between a double play and an RBI. So if the thought of little league brings back the warm fuzzies for you, then maybe it could also make a little bit of peace in the Middle East. Baseball’s history is a mixed bag, reflecting the political conflicts of its time and place. And in recent weeks, sports historian Dave Zirin has shone a spotlight on some of the sports’ dark days. So if sports can truly be a force for good in the world — and I do believe that it can — then let us help to make it so!

Photographs by Peter Menzel

Blog by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Man cannot survive on bread alone. But he certainly cannot survive without bread… or at least its nutritional equivalent. Once upon a time, our ancestors simply wandered through the rainforests and picked fresh fruit out of the air, or dug protein-rich nuts out of the ground, and ate them on the spot. We can simulate the same hunter-gatherer foraging experience when we meander up and down the aisles of Whole Foods or some other supermarket, and help ourselves to marinated olives, or sample one of half a dozen different kinds of croissants. Certainly, the food cycle has come full circle, and we once again find ourselves in the gastronomical Garden of Eden, able to almost effortlessly satisfy our food requirements.

Now I don’t mean to spit in your whole wheat organic grain non-genetically modified corn flakes… but if you believe what I just wrote in the previous paragraph to be true, then you may be metaphorically standing on a sandy beach, soaking up the sun, facing away from the shoreline, not noticing the 100-foot high tsunami that is about to alter our reality, irrevocably. If you live in North America or Northern Europe, then you have your pick of the crop, every crop. But the crop is increasingly grown elsewhere, criss-crossing thousands of fossil fuel miles before it reaches your borders, let alone your plate. Which means that according to no less authoritative a source than the US Army, it’s all going to cost much, much more in the very near future.

Our situation is not unlike that of the biblical Joseph, who knew that the years of agricultural surplus would be followed by years of shortfall. According to the Torah, Joseph raised taxes through the roof, restricting the consumption patterns of average Egyptians, thereby preventing gluttonous waste in the epoch of the cornucopia. It took a totalitarian regime with a benevolent dictator, and clever experts in agriculture and economics, to have the foresight to draw up a suitable plan of action, and the political power to implement it. Three thousand five hundred years later, we aren’t short on Einsteins of Agronomy — award-winning author Michael Pollan is but one of them — but the plutocratic political apparatus stymies any effort to execute a sustainable food policy.

The truth is that while we wait for the tip-toe of the other shoe to fall, its heel has already hit the ground, and it’s starting to crush communities all over the world. In the last three years, more than twenty different third-world countries across the globe experienced full-scale food riots due to rising prices. Even in the USA, if you live in an impoverished community, the food situation is dismal and deteriorating rapidly. Two summers ago, a line-up for food stamps in Milwaukee, Wisconsin turned into a chaotic free-for-all, the kind of tragic disaster that was only supposed to happen elsewhere. We’ve all been eating the equivalent of ten calories in petro-dollars, for every one calorie of actual edible foodstuffs. And now we’re going to have to wean ourselves off of the black crack.

I wish that all of the captains of industry would have spent the world’s oil wealth more wisely. But at this point, instead of crying over spilled milk, let’s save and not waste the little milk we have left, make sure that everyone gets their fair share of milk, and make an intelligent plan for future milk production and distribution. Pester your elected officials until they step up to the plate and take responsibility for the future of food. And give generously to the organizations that are staving off starvation for the most at-risk among us. Groups like Meir Panim and Yad Ezra V’Shulamit feed the needy in Israel, making sure that people who need it get three square meals a day. Really, it’s the least we can do, considering all of the calories that we consume. And the next least thing we can do is to start saving seeds.

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Sometimes when I am scanning news items, I have a weird out-of-body experience. I read some story that’s buried in the electronic equivalent of the back page, and I can’t understand why it isn’t one page one, on the top of the page. In really big bold letters. Every single day, for at least a year. Zooming out of our solar system, I picture in my mind’s eye what we must look like to a race of aliens from another galaxy. When I feel connected to gOd, I wonder if she feels frustrated by our infantile myopia.

Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one that is frustrated by the fluff that passes for news in the mainstream media. There is an organization called The Long Now Foundation that sits on a cloud somewhere up on Alpha Centauri with a massive telescope, sifting through the incessant babble on Planet Earth, filtering out whatever will be irrelevant in a year, ten years, a hundred years’ time. It would seem that means about 99.9% of what passes for news items nowadays! Thanks, Long Now, I’m glad someone’s looking out for future generations.

Now I’m not so sullen and serious, I’m willing to listen to all kinds of trivial information that doesn’t have anything to do with my survival. It’s completely natural for human beings to be interested in each other’s love lives, and I’m a sucker for a good soap opera, straight up. But I just don’t understand why the news agencies have to lead with this stuff. Okay, so Lady Gaga is now dating Marilyn Manson; Wow! My life is oh-so much more complete for knowing this potent piece of information. But is it more important than the imminent evaporation of the Jordan River?

Just what I said! The Jordan River — yup, same one as in the Torah — is going to be the Jordan RiverBED in a year and a half! I live in this country and I read the news headlines every day. Why am I learning about this from ecological groups on the other side of the ocean? This is the single largest source of fresh water in Israel. Needless to say, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, like other human beings all over the world, are essentially skin-sacks of water and a handful of minerals. No water, no us. Why aren’t we talking about this?!

That’s a rhetorical question. I know at least a few of the reasons why water is not on the media radar. The largest consumers of water on the Israeli side of the river are the big agro-businesses. Well, we need to eat, right? Yes, we do; it is important that we grow our own food. Growing food locally means that fresh fruit and vegetables make it to your table much quicker, with far fewer petroleum dollars. Also, the ability to provide for our own nutritional needs ensures that we will remain a sovereign state, whether we get along with our neighbors or not.

Okay, so we need to divert water from the Jordan River in order to grow food crops. But do we really need to reduce the river to desertification levels in order to grow dates and grapes, not for ourselves, but for Northern European people thousands of miles away? I imagine that large profits are being made selling Mediterranean mangos to Scotland and Scandinavia, but at what cost? This water is the lifesblood of every living being in the bioregion, it cannot be embedded and exported in the form of fruit just so Montsanto can make a quick buck!

I’m not a protectionist patriot, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t engage in fair trade with far-off friends and allies. But to be stocking supermarket shelves from the UK to Canada means selling off our dissipating water supplies. As the Cree people say: “Only when the last tree has been cut down; Only when the last river has been poisoned; Only when the last fish has been caught; Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten!” I repeat: you cannot eat hummus with computer chips, you cannot eat felafels made out of fighter jets, and you cannot eat New Israeli Shekels!

Have I struck terror into your hearts with tales of our water woes? I must sound like Debbie Downer, huh? Yeah, this is the second reason why the media almost never makes mention of it. Who wants to hear such horrible news? Please don’t kill the messenger! Okay, friend, I’m going to cut a deal with you. I’m going to tell you the name of an organization here in Israel that is doing whatever it can to protect our precious water supply. What do you say? You help them help us out, and I’ll stop manic street preaching? Deal?

Okay: the name of the organization is Good Water Neighbors, and here is their webpage. Thank you in advance. And if you love H2O like I love H2O, learn more at Know Your H2O!

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Two weeks ago while walking down Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, between the swanky coffee shops on Shenkin and the monstrous office towers of the financial sector, I came upon a public art installation sponsored by one of Israel’s biggest banks. It was a series of sculptures intended to represent housing alternatives. Some of the displays were symbolic, abstract, metaphorical musings on the meaning of house and home. Others were attempts to shock passersby by assembling the shelter from unconventional materials. But least one of these was a realistic structure that could actually have practical application.

We generally think of objects as massive tool libraries that we live inside of, workshops with shelves that contain all of the things that we need to conduct our lives — clothes, kitchen utensils, books, etc. This particular installation inverted the void of the traditional shelter, turning container architecture into an endoskeleton: a cube in which all of the tools for living are stored away in drawers that slide in and out as required. The person or persons associated with the house don’t live “in” it, but “around” it; like the camping stove that you pull out of the trunk of your car at a tailgate party. Except without the car. Imagine a life-size Rubik’s Cube containing all of your personal property.

Having studied architecture myself, I was intrigued by a project that challenges conventional notions of personal space. And as someone who has lived for most of my life in the big city, I am especially concerned by the steadily increasing numbers of people that don’t have a bed that they can call their own, brothers and sisters that have no choice but to sleep on the street. In fact, I didn’t have to go far to be reminded of this ironic reality. Right beside the transforming trailer, a couple of disheveled middle-aged men were sitting on a wooden bench, slouched over and looking dejected. By the orangey tone of their exposed epidermis, you could tell that they have nowhere to go to escape the blazing hot summer sun.

Certainly, a comprehensive solution to the homelessness crisis facing Israel and other countries around the world demands that we take a long, hard look at the causes of the problem, not only its symptoms. Not every street person is lazy and mentally unstable! In fact, studies show that most are victims of an industrial bureaucracy that abandons its own once they get stuck in the quicksand of capital. Like a massive game of musical chairs, the current economic system all but guarantees that a large proportion of the population is only a paycheck or two away from the streets. And once you fall all the way to the bottom of the money pyramid, it’s almost impossible to clamber and claw your way back up for air.

Yes, we need a concerted approach to the problem of how do we house everyone that wants to be housed. But in addition to a national task force on homelessness, we desperately need a public policy of harm reduction. Certainly, we need to prevent people from finding themselves on the streets to begin with. And perhaps part of the problem is indeed architectural. But at the same time, we need resources to provide comfort and aid to the human beings that have had the misfortune of falling through the cracks. Two groups that are at the forefront of this fight are YEDID’s Homelessness Prevention Project and the Shanti House’s Around-the-Clock-Family. When I give to organizations like these, I feel like I can walk down Rothschild Boulevard without having to turn my head away.

by guest blogger Shlomi Mini of NA LAGA’AT

It is rather unusual for an online giving platform to engage in raising a large gift to construct a new workshop room. We were happy for JGooders to do that and help NA LAGA’AT get this generous gift of 120,000 NIS from the Deborah Silin and Samuel Heinrich Winograd Fund.

The NA LAGA’AT Center in Jaffa includes a theater emsemble of deaf and blind actors, a café with deaf waiters, and a “Dining in the Dark” restaurant with blind waiters!

This Center’s emsemble of deaf and blind actors is made up of an amazing group of people, most of whom suffer from Asher’s Syndrome, in which one is born deaf, and gradually loses sight over the years.

The idea to introduce a new group of deaf and blind actors to the performing arts was born out of the NA LAGA’AT vision of socially integrating disabled people and enabling them to support themselves and express themselves artistically.

Training deaf and blind actors is no easy feat; in the beginning, some of the actors cannot even communicate with one another. To enable the special kind of communication that occurs between the arts team and the actors themselves, the actors receive Sign Language classes and Touch Language classes. Touch Language is an older version of Sign Language for the visually-impaired.

In the end, the Center’s staff learns “Glove Language”, a special language in which every joint on the back of the hand symbolizes a letter, making it possible to “type” on the hand. With the help of this special language, communication is possible between the Center staff that do not know Sign Language and the deaf and blind actors.

Until now, there hadn’t been a permanent place for this work, it would take place in any number of places: the theatre stage, the café, or the Center lobby.

The construction of the new workshop room will make it possible to work comfortably with a new group of deaf and blind actors who have need of a consistent familiar environment where they can relax, find their places and feel comfortable getting around on their own.

The workshop room will also be used for Sign Language workshops for the general public. These workshops give able-bodied people a window into the special world that is beyond verbal communication.

The NA LAGA’AT Organization is grateful to Devorah Silin and Samuel Heinrich Winograd for their generous donation, to Ilan Orenstein for representing the donors so efficiently, and to the Director of JGooders, Ronit Dolev, and the whole JGooders Team, for originally introducing us to the benefactors.

Video on Israeli Channel Two

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

Life on the material plane is full of all kinds of contradictions. It’s impossible to always walk the talk; inevitably, there is going to be a gap between what we say and what we do. If you slip up once in a while, it doesn’t discredit every single thing that you stand for. But at the same time, there has got to be some consistency in your rhetorical arguments. If I’m able to poke holes in your propaganda without even working up a sweat, then you had better go back to the drawing board and start plugging up those holes in your internal logic. And if you try to force your imperfect ideology down my throat… then to paraphrase John Wayne, I’ll make such a stink that you’ll be walking in and out of your Yeshiva with gas masks.

This article is about religious ritual and cultural appropriation. It’s about religious sensitivities and fundamentalist fury. It’s about identifying enemies and the separation of synagogue and state. And it’s about a Jewish woman living in Israel, standing at a bus stop in Beersheba last week, minding her own business… and being beaten by a stranger. Her crime: her uncovered arms bore the imprint of tefillin — phylacteries, the leather straps that Jewish religious men strap to their arms every morning. This article is about male privilege and misogyny. It’s about power-play and sadomasochism. And it’s about the hypocracy of Zionist Jews hating Islam for supposedly feminist reasons.

Orthodox Jews follow the Torah and Talmud to the letter of the law, so they must justify any position that they take with supporting scripture. This allows for some flexibility, because many religious issues remain in dispute. If you can find at least one respected rabbi that shares your point of view, you can claim to follow his interpretation of the law. In the case of phylacteries, it states in the Talmud that Michal, the daughter of King Saul and King David’s first wife, wore tefillin, as did all three of Rashi’s daughters. By legalistic standards, that settles the matter. Rama, a Polish dude that lived some four hundred and fifty years ago, believed that women should be discouraged from laying tefillin. But he never said a single thing about beating them.

In a secular democracy, we do not defer to a bunch of dead white guys when deciding what to do. Correction: we defer to a different bunch of dead white guys when deciding what to do. There are plenty of problems with representative democracy, and there are many obstacles that are preventing women from achieving full equality in Israeli society. The Israeli government is an old boys’ club: only about 17% of the Knesset seats are filled by female members. But at the very least, on paper, women are guaranteed equal rights under the law. That means the freedom of speech. It means the freedom of religious expression. It means the freedom to dress any which way they want to in a public place. If you don’t like what you see, then look in the other direction, or just walk away. And keep your damn hands to yourself, thank you very much.

Now I’m going to say a few things about tefillin itself. Physical phylacteries were found in the Qmran caves where the Dead Sea scrolls were uncovered, so we know for a fact that this actual practice is at least two thousand years old. In the biblical book of Deuteronomy (11:13), Yahweh instructs the people to bind themselves with signs to symbolize their subservience to him: “to serve me, with all of your heart and soul”. Regarding the reasons for laying tefillin, Maimonedes said, “As long as the tefillin are on the head and on the arm of a person, they will be modest and God-fearing”. So both the Torah and Talmud explicitly state that phylacteries are a symbol of bondage, to God. Of course, this would be incredibly obvious to anyone without all of our cultural baggage.  I’m not going to post photos of any real people wearing leather straps on their arms… but if a UFO full of space aliens came down to earth and saw what we were getting up in arms about…

All I am saying here is that tefillin is an article of clothing that symbolizes the exchange of power. It is about giving your power up to God — committing yourself to follow what you believe to be His wishes. But it is also about absorbing power — create a connection between yourself and the Diety, the Divine. These rituals — and the daily life of an observant Orthodox Jew is chock-full of dozens, or even hundreds of rituals just like this — bestow upon the actor enhanced status, and they grant him greater standing in the community. In a class society, heterosexual male privilege is the final refuge for men whose lives have been stomped on by systemic poverty. That’s why, when women and sensitive men challenge conventional notions of masculinity that say that women and men are diametrically different, and that the man is always the head of the household — it is a kick in the groin to the poor sod that has long-since cut a deal with the religious power-brokers, trading his freedom for some small measure of political power.

One last point: those Jews that would attack Iran, claiming that its religious regime oppresses women and other minorities, would do well to ensure that their own homes are made out of a lot less glass than they currently are, before they start throwing stones by the sack-full. Of course, it is dead wrong for Muslim modesty police to beat women on the streets and back alleys of Isfahan for not complying with their repressive dress code. The religious elite may legislate the activities that are permitted to take place in the public space, but they cannot control women’s bodies; they can wear whatever they want to, and adorn themselves as they wish. But our own three-thousand-year-old religion is rife with similar restrictions, and its practitioners are violating people’s human rights right here in the Holy Land. So if you want to go to war with Iran, come up with some other justification, don’t use a feminist fig leaf. Let the Persians protest against their own persecutors… and if you want to fight for the feminists, then bring the battle back to Beersheba.

Ultimately, symbols cannot ever be owned. They can be utilized for the effect they were intended for, and they can be culture-jammed to serve the exact opposite purpose. If you don’t want to be associated with something or someone that you strongly disagree with, then don’t become attached to any symbols that can be reappropriated. After all, the most fundamental tenet of Abrahamic Judaism is iconoclasm, the smashing of all false idols. And maybe the most fundamental tenet of Rabbinic Judaism is the multiplicity of interpretations, the never-ending debate over the best way to be a better person. So if you want to give women a way to study Torah and reclaim it for themselves, then check out the Women’s Institute for Jewish Studies. And if you want to support women who have been the victims of violence, then check out Empowerment for Independence. Because this isn’t a democracy until the streets are safe for all of our sisters. Happy Shavuot!

by David Sheen, JGooders Content Editor

They believed in the old ways, they practiced a religion that was different than that of the majority. They refrained from eating some of the foods that their neighbors ate, and their clothes looked a little bit different. They were poor people, but they were very happy. They were a close-knit family that loved one another very much. And they had committed no criminal act. But the authorities hated them because they wouldn’t assimilate or leave the land. Let them go back to wherever rock they had crawled out from! Their very existence posed a problem for the people in power; their rejection of the officially state-sanctioned way of life poked holes in their propaganda. For if people were allowed to live differently, then maybe the masses would start to get their own ideas?

They were of a different race, a hated race. They were dirty, and they had too many babies. And they were starting to get uppity. Who did these people think they were? When they walked down the street, they didn’t play their submissive position and acknowledge the superiority of the lords of the land. This fearless family would have to be taught a lesson, made an example of, to send a message to others of their ilk: you will never be better than second-class citizens. So one day at dawn, the military moved in with 500 soldiers. They cleared the streets and unleashed a furious assault: 10,000 rounds of bullets and incendiary bombs. After 90 minutes of massacre, 6 adults and 5 children had been murdered. The building was engulfed in flames, and soon the whole ghetto was being burned to the ground.

If someone reading this article is more of a Jewish Nationalist, then they might think that the first two paragraphs of this article are about a Jewish family in Europe during the Russian Pogroms or the Nazi Holocaust. If the person reading this article is more of a Jewish Internationalist, then they may come to the conclusion that I’ve been talking about a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem or the West Bank. In truth, I have been describing neither. What you just finished reading is an authentic account of the sequence of events that occurred in Philadelphia, PA exactly 25 years ago to this day. On May 13, 1985, American paramilitary police stormed the home of a Black family called the MOVE Organization, and dropped C-4 explosives from a helicopter overhead, killing almost everyone inside.

Almost all of the media attention that the MOVE Organization receives focusses intensely on the police attacks. And it is very important to talk about these evil attacks. Why did they happen? According to some press reports, the members of MOVE were so assertive that they bordered on being abrasive. Because they were so ideologically different from the surrounding society, they may have been social justice snobs, activists who look down upon apathetic passivists. In other words, if you weren’t doing whatever you could to make the world a better place, you may have found them to be more than annoying. But being annoying is a constitutionally-protected human right. If it weren’t, Glenn Beck would be serving consecutive life sentences in solitary.

Being annoying was the excuse used by the Philadephia Police Commissioner to slaughter a dozen men, women and children in cold blood, then cover up all of the evidence. But their true crime? They were health-conscious hippies, and they were Black. They let their hair grow into long dreadlocks. They wouldn’t eat animals, and they took in stray dogs, to save them from being poached by the pound. They refused to use petrochemical products on their bodies, and they composted their food and human waste. They didn’t do drugs or alcohol, and they home-schooled their children. Today, every single one of these tenet is embraced by environmentalists as the very paragon of a healthy lifestyle, for people and for the planet. But back then, they were so much vermin to be exterminated.

Last year I traveled to Philadelphia to interview the only adult to walk out of that building alive, Ramona Africa. Far from a foaming-at-the-mouth fundamentalist, she warmly welcomed me into her home and told me the story of the Africa family. They weren’t a menace to society. They were just born 25 years before their time. And if they had been white people, then the state wouldn’t have paid them any mind, and just let them be. But back in the day, to unabashedly proclaim that all of the oppressions are connected, and that we must reject the unlimited-growth model economy before it depletes the planet was considered to be treasonous to industrialism, blasphemous to capitalism. And to prevent these ideas from spreading among the African-American population, they were viciously squashed. When white Teabaggers reject the state system, they are treated like heroes. When black people do the same, they are incinerated.

An American court of law later admitted that MOVE had done nothing to deserve what had happened to them, and awarded Ramona financial compensation, forcing the City of Philadelphia to fork over $1.5 million. That money will never bring back all of her brothers and sisters that were cut down in the prime of their lives. And the fear that had been instilled in the hearts and minds of progressive people all over America set the ecojustice movement back a quarter-century or more. But today, when every mainstream eco-organization finally admits that we need to rewrite the rules and create a complete culture shift, it is correct to remember that we stand upon the shoulders of giants: people who had the courage to tell the truth against all odds. They may have talked and talked and talked the talk and talked people’s heads right off. But they walked the walk before anybody else did. May we merit to march in their footsteps.